Brzezinski: America Needs Coherent Foreign Policy, Domestic Income Equality, Action on Climate Change

Foreign policy giant Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski died yesterday.

When I got my first full-time debate coaching gig, the policy debate topic was Russia. I instructed my policy debaters to read Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard for background.

Donald Trump likely can’t even say Brzezinski, let alone comprehend what Brzezinski said about the need for a genuinely strong America to preserve global stability:

[In 2012, Brzezinski] once again assessed the United States’ global standing in “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.” Here he argued that continued American strength abroad was vital to global stability, but that it would depend on the country’s ability to foster “social consensus and democratic stability” at home.

Essential to those goals, he wrote, would be a narrowing of the yawning income gap between the wealthiest and the rest, a restructuring of the financial system so that it no longer mainly benefited “greedy Wall Street speculators” and a meaningful response to climate change.

A United States in decline, he said — one “unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal reasons, worthy of its engagement” — could lead to a “protracted phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers” [Daniel Lewis, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Dies at 89,” New York Times, 2017.05.26].

Brzezinski decried Trump’s lack of coherent foreign policy on March 17, a diagnosis uncontradicted by the last ten weeks of Trump’s continuing humiliation of America:

MARTIN: Can you attribute any of this to the fact that this is a new administration full of outsiders who aren’t political careerists, who are just trying to get their footing? Can you see eventually a more cohesive foreign policy and bureaucratic structure coming into place later?

BRZEZINSKI: From the top down, if there is a from-the-top-down leadership, yes. But I don’t see that from the top-down leadership. I have been involved in or an observer of several administration changes and including some very basic disagreements about foreign policy. But these were serious disagreements with clear purposes in mind, even if these purposes were different or clashing.

I don’t see any of that. I think the United States is currently a kind of wonder – wonderland with the president speaking on subjects of his choice, some of which are entertaining, but none of which are very strategically substantive [Rachel Martin, “Zbigniew Brzezinski on Trump’s Foreign Policy,” NPR: Morning Edition, 2017.03.17].

The Russians and other world leaders are laughing at Trump’s America. Brzezinski would not put up with such self-inflicted embarrassment, and neither should we. Trump, shape up or ship out. Our dominant position on the Grand Chessboard depends on it.